“Yeah.”
“Yup.”
“I’m good.”
“Works for me.”
“Welcome to the squad, Toby!” Lucy, who I could only infer seriously needed to switch to decaf, squealed at high volume. She threw her arms around me. “We’re going to have so much fun!”
This was not happening.
I extracted myself from Lucy’s grasp. For the first time, I really looked at the room around me, and the venomous response on the tip of my tongue faded into what in all honesty I would describe as incoherent mumbling.
“Wha…huh…whaaa?”
While the drop to the trampoline hadn’t been more than eight or ten feet, I was now standing at the top of a spiral staircase. The others pushed and prodded me down it, and when I reached the bottom, all I could do was continue with my incoherent mumbling. The room was easily three stories tall, with thick white Plexiglas walls that looked like something out of The Matrix. I counted four doors, two staircases, and what can only be described as the world’s biggest flat-screen television.
I couldn’t help thinking of my flippant words to Noah the day before. Unbeknownst to me, the cheerleaders really did have a secret lair.
“Impressive, isn’t it?” Tara took a step forward to stand beside me. Her low voice echoed in the massive space. “I’m sure you must be overwhelmed. We all were, at first.”
“Maybe you were”—Chloe delivered the words with a patented Chloe Larson eye roll—“but I’m never whelmed.”
“All right.” Tara rolled with the punches. “We were all overwhelmed at first, except for Chloe, who is unwhelmable.” Her low, even tone never changed, but the look in her eyes at the “unwhelmable” comment made me smile for the first time since I’d been told to stretch that morning.
“What exactly is this place?” I addressed the question to Tara, who seemed (teal hand incident aside) the least likely to force me to commit cheerocide.
“This,” Tara said simply, “is the Quad.”
“The Quad,” I repeated.
The other girls nodded.
“The Squad Quad,” Brooke said, and as she stepped forward, the other girls, even Tara, edged back. “An underground, state-of-the-art, soundproof, bulletproof, boyproof, waterproof, digitalized, motorized, tantalizingly secure fourteen-thousand-square-foot enclosure equipped with everything from radar to TiVo.”
“TiVo,” I repeated.
“Let me break it down for you, To-bee.” Brooke broke my name into two distinct syllables. “You’re standing in the middle of one of the government’s most elite operative agencies.”
“Operatives.” I couldn’t seem to stop repeating everything she said.
“Operatives. Secret agents. Spies. Charlie’s Angels meets James Bond meets Bring It On.”
“Bring what on?”
Brooke gave me a look. “We’re the best of the best. We’re pretty, we’re smart…” She arched an eyebrow at me, and I remembered the way she’d thrown me across the room. “We’re in perfect physical condition, and best of all, we never get caught.” She shot me a toothy grin. “After all, who’s going to suspect the cheerleaders?”
Not me, that was for damn sure.
“You’re telling me that Bayport High’s varsity cheerleading squad is a cover for a group of government superspies?” She had to realize how ridiculous that sounded.
“You know, Toby, maybe you’re not as slow as we thought.”
I didn’t have time to respond to that particular insult before Brooke lifted her hands and clapped eight times, a rhythm I vaguely remembered trying to scour out of my brain after the one mandatory pep rally I hadn’t managed to skip the year before. As soon as Brooke finished clapping, the others repeated her motions, and the lights dimmed.
“Screen on.” Brooke didn’t sound like a cheerleader. I didn’t have time to decide what she did sound like before the plasma screen in front of us turned on and an image appeared.
“Is that my yearbook picture?” I almost didn’t recognize myself. They’d blown the picture up to larger-than-life-size, and you could totally see up my nose.
“Wow. Talk about unfortunate photos.” One of the cheerleaders let out a low whistle at the picture, but Brooke glared whoever it was back into silence.
“Toby Guinevere Klein. Born August nineteenth. Brown hair, brown eyes, medium skin tone. Five feet, three inches, a hundred and three pounds as of last Wednesday.”
First the picture, now my weight and my hideous middle name. I couldn’t wait to see what they pulled out next.
“Your father’s a physicist. Your mother’s a karate instructor. Your little brother, Noah—”
“Leave Noah out of this.”
Brooke inclined her head slightly. “Fine. We’ll get back to you.”
That definitely sounded like a threat.
“Third-degree black belt, two suspensions so far this school year, a total of fourteen at your last seven schools, dating back to the third grade, when you belted a sixth grader in the groin for throwing gravel at your classmates.”
I smiled. I’d almost forgotten about that.
“You’re a novice computer hacker.”
I narrowed my eyes. Who was she calling novice?
“Next.” At her one-word command, the image on the screen changed (thank God), and I found myself looking at an extensive list of company names and dates.
“Look familiar?”
I skimmed the list: Freemont Electronics, Conley Anti-Virus, Semi-National Bank and Trust, the Girl Scouts of America…
“Vaguely familiar,” I replied before she could continue.
“It’s a list of every secure system you’ve breached in the last twenty-six months,” Brooke said, and for the first time, I caught something that might have sounded like respect in her pretty-girl voice.
“Impressed?” I asked.
Chloe scoffed on Brooke’s behalf. “Get over yourself, hacker spaz.”
Apparently, a simple “computer geek” was too passé.
“Impressed?” Brooke repeated. “Puh-lease. This is kiddie play.”
Hey! I was deeply insulted. That bank and trust one hadn’t exactly been a piece of cake.
“What is impressive,” Brooke continued, “is what you did twenty-six months ago.” She turned her attention back to the screen. “Next.”
I recognized the code the moment I saw it. “Oh,” I said. “That.”
“Yes. That.”
Before I explain what “that” was, I’d like to take this opportunity to say that when I’d weaseled my way past the firewalls and hijacked one of the user IDs, I thought the site was fake, one of those things that a hacker will put up on the Net just to see if there’s anyone better out there. I figured that if it was legit, I wouldn’t break through, as simple as that—only not, because it was legit and I did break through. My bad.
“The Pentagon,” Brooke said. “Not bad for a thirteen-year-old girl.”
“I was almost fourteen.” I glanced away.
“Four months later, your dad was transferred here,” Brooke said. “And you’ve been lying low ever since.”
There wasn’t really anything to say to that. I had been lying kind of low. I mean, the Girl Scouts? Not exactly my best showing.
“Well, you’re in luck, Toby.” The no-teeth smile was back. “It’s football season, the Squad needs ten members, and our hacker graduated last year.”
“And if I say no?”
Brooke showed her teeth. “You won’t.” She walked over to a nearby conference table, and one by one, the other eight cheerleaders took their places, filling all but two of the seats. Brooke leaned back and hit some buttons on her chair’s arm. The image on the screen changed again.
“Tara Leery,” Brooke said. “Nice picture, by the way, Tare.”
Tara mouthed a silent “Thanks,” and Brooke looked back at the screen.
“British exchange student and linguistic specialist. Fluent in nine languages, functional i
n twelve others, Tara has a perfect ear for accents. If we come across it, she can learn to speak it.”
Brooke tapped a button with her French-manicured nail, and the picture on the plasma screen changed. “Bubbles Lane, contortionist.”
Brooke didn’t elaborate, but Bubbles did. “I can put my feet behind my head.”
I racked my mind for the proper response to her proud declaration, but the best I could do was a rather unenthusiastic “That’s nice.”
“It’s even nicer when you need someone to fit in a duffel bag,” Chloe said sharply. “Or when the bomb you need to deactivate is hidden in the back of an air duct with laser sensor triggers no normal person could avoid.”
A bomb? Personally, I wasn’t really sure Bubbles could deactivate a washing machine.
“And speaking of bombs…” Brooke paused as the screen changed again. “Lucy Wheeler, explosives and weaponry.”
I thought of Lucy jumping around doing herkies like a four-year-old on reverse Ritalin.
“Explosives?” I swallowed hard. “Weaponry?”
Lucy beamed at me. “I love Tasers.”
I took about five seconds to desperately hope they were joking.
“And right now, I’m working on the coolest bulletproof push-up bra.” Lucy’s smile grew, if possible, even brighter.
“It’s to die for.”
Tasers and bulletproof push-up bras. In practically the same sentence. So wrong. So, so wrong.
As I digested the wrongness of it all, Brooke ran through the rest of the squad. Apparently party girl Zee was a professional profiler, the twins generally came in handy because there were two of them (I still maintained they had a combined IQ lower than that of the average penguin), Chloe was their resident “gadget girl in Gucci,” and Brooke, as far as I could tell, was exactly what she had always appeared to be: a gorgeous, terrifying, manipulative bitch who could lie, cheat, and steal with the best of them.
“The entire squad is, of course, trained in hand-to-hand combat.”
I thought about how close Brooke’s roundhouse had come to taking me down. Could they all fight like that?
“You’re serious about this.” I don’t know why I said it. I mean, the giant plasma screen with the access code for the Pentagon should have been a big clue, but somehow, I couldn’t help asking.
Brooke looked straight through me. “We save lives, Toby. That’s how serious we are.”
I said nothing.
“We also cheer at games,” she continued. “We chant and we yell and we do backflips for the football team so that no one ever suspects we’re up to anything else.”
“And herkies,” Lucy added.
“And we do herkies,” Brooke amended. “Think you can handle it?” She leaned back in her chair, and she must have hit the button again, because all of a sudden, the list of companies I’d hacked into reappeared on the screen.
“Are you trying to blackmail me?” I kept my voice even.
Brooke shrugged. “Is it working?”
I closed my eyes for a long moment and then opened them again. “Maybe.”
Tasting victory, Brooke leaned forward. “You’re either with us or you’re against us,” she said. Like that was original. “If you’re with us, you’ll learn how to break into any building, how to lie your way into or out of any situation, how to look like one person one minute and another the next. You’ll go undercover, you’ll have limitless access to highly classified technology, and if you make it through your first two years, by your eighteenth birthday, you’ll be a fully authorized CIA operative. Sooner or later, you’ll probably save the world.” She paused. “Plus you’re like totally guaranteed to be on homecoming court.”
Yippee, I thought, glancing back up at the screen. Brooke hadn’t mentioned what would happen if I was against them, but I could guess. Hacking wasn’t exactly a legal hobby, especially when the Pentagon was involved.
“I’m sure you’ll even come up against codes you can’t crack,” Brooke added offhandedly.
And that’s when I knew I was going to say yes. After all, I was the girl who’d never met a code she couldn’t crack, and I wasn’t about to let some cheerleader tell me otherwise.
“I’m in,” I said, “but I am not wearing one of those stupid skirts.”
CHAPTER 6
Code Word: Bitquo
“You’ll need to get outfitted,” Brooke told me. “And not just for the uniform.”
Apparently, my skirt stipulation had fallen on completely deaf ears.
“Chloe, you’ll set her up with the basics?” Brooke asked.
Chloe nodded. “Earpiece, communicator, digi-disk, truth serum…”
“And for the love of all things good and popular, get her some accessories.” Brooke spared me another glance.
“Those boots are going to have to go.” I opened my mouth, but she continued spitting out orders like I didn’t even exist. “Tiff, you and Britt are on makeover detail. Lucy, minor explosives only, please, and Tara?”
“Yes?”
“You’ll be her partner.”
That was the best news I’d heard all day. It was almost enough to make me forget that the phrase makeover detail had ever exited Brooke’s mouth.
“Tara will give you the 411,” the totalitarian captain told me, “but first, we have a few Squad matters to discuss.” Brooke glanced from me to one of the empty chairs at the table and back again. I gritted my teeth, but took a seat. I waited for Brooke to begin another long soliloquy on the cheerleading spy business, but instead, she turned to Zee, who nodded.
“I added the most recent body language indices to our files,” Zee said, “and ran another set of statistical analyses on the remaining candidates. Hate to break it to you guys, but Stephanie Stanton is out. She’s too jittery, too nervous, and in combination with what we already know about her susceptibility to subliminal suggestion, she’s too big of a liability.”
Stephanie Stanton. Why did that name sound familiar?
“But…but…” One of the twins tried to object.
“I know, I know,” Zee said. “Her brother is hot, but she’d totally crack under the pressure. She’s a double blinker, and they can’t keep secrets worth a damn.”
“A double blinker?” I asked.
Unlike Chloe, Zee answered my question in a perfectly reasonable tone of voice. “She blinks twice as often when you look directly at her.”
Okay, I thought, trying to keep up. Double blinkers = bad secret keepers. And this from one of the single biggest gossip-mongers at my high school.
“And the subliminal suggestion part?” I asked.
“Messages on the bathroom stalls,” Brooke replied. “The Big Guys Upstairs engineer them, and we implant them as part of our screening process.”
It was then that everything they were saying clicked into place, and I remembered who Stephanie Stanton was. She wasn’t some enemy agent with a thick foreign accent. She was the pretty sophomore who’d sat next to me at the meeting—the one with the newly single, hot older brother.
Brooke had said that the squad needed ten members. Counting me, we currently numbered nine.
“So who’s still in?” Brooke asked.
Zee looked through her notes.
“Hayley Hoffman, April Manning, Kiki McCall…”
JV cheerleaders: my very favorite people.
“…Courtney Apex, and Sarasota Bane.”
The last two were names that, being the social butterfly I was, I didn’t quite recognize, but when their pictures flashed across the screen, I vaguely recalled having seen them at the meeting.
“Ix-nay on the ane-Bay,” twin-on-the-left said. I got the feeling that this was as close to speaking in code as she could come. “Split ends much?”
“Tiffany,” Brooke said, her voice surprisingly patient, “we can’t rule out a candidate because of split ends.”
Immediately, twin-on-the-right (who my advanced powers of deduction told me was Brittany) jumped to her siste
r’s defense. “We already have to deal with her.” Brittany jerked her head toward me. “If we take another neg-soc on, people are going to start getting suspicious.”
“Neg-soc?”
Zee had the decency to look slightly embarrassed. “Despite your special skills,” she said delicately, “you have what we refer to as a…uhhh…a negative social index.”
All things considered, that was probably putting it mildly.
“Okay,” Brooke said. “Bane is out.”
If Brooke’s “we save lives” spiel was to be taken seriously, we were deciding in whose hands we should place the fate of the free world, and a candidate had just been eliminated because of split ends.
“I think we should kick out Hayley Hoffman,” I said, taking a stand. The others looked at me, and I improvised.
“Her bitquo is too high, and we’re already at capacity.”
“Bitquo?” Tara might have been fighting back a smile as she spoke. It was hard to tell.
I looked at Brittany (also known as Miss We-Already-Have-to-Deal-with-Toby-the-Social-Reject) as I answered. “Bitch quotient.”
Needless to say, that comment did not go over terribly well.
“Hayley’s a strong applicant,” Chloe informed me tersely.
“Her social index is in our ideal range, she’s a solid athlete, a leader, and she lies outstandingly well.”
“So Hoffman stays on the list,” Brooke said, not even giving me time to come up with another clever retort.
“What about Courtney Apex?”
She zoomed in on Courtney’s picture, and I recognized her as Bayport High’s own pseudoprominent cosmetics model.
“She’s afraid of fire,” Lucy said, wrinkling her nose. Apparently, to the too-cheerful (no pun intended) explosives expert, that was a cardinal sin.
“And she may be somewhat recognizable from that toothpaste ad,” Tara added.
“I like her,” Brittany said firmly. “Good bone structure.”
Bubbles shook her head. “Too tall,” she said. “I mean, can you imagine having to toss her over a security wall?”
“Apex is out.” Brooke made the decision, and no one questioned it. “What about Kiki McCall and April Manning?”